


Happy Landings

by tellezara



Category: Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 18:16:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/625184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tellezara/pseuds/tellezara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phoenix needs to land his plane, but with his dashboard smashed to pieces, he's going to have some trouble... (WWI AU)</p><p>[Response to Kink Meme prompt asking for AA characters as World War fighter pilots]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Landings

Phoenix poked dolefully at the smashed dial with a gloved finger. Fine glass fragments dislodged themselves and were blown away by the wind. No matter which way you looked at it, things were pretty dire. Far below him, a pair of lights marked the beginning of the runway he was supposed to be landing on. Three times he had circled it now, trying to figure out how to pull this off.

_Oh, to hell with this._

He banked right, then levelled off, pushing the aircraft’s nose down to lose height. He knew the layout of the airstrip by heart, God knows he’d done this approach enough times. Whatever he did, something was going to get broken, and damned if it was going to be his poor kite, it had been through enough tonight. Lower, lower, low enough to be able to make out the outlines of the huts and hangars ahead. The wind was whistling through the wing struts, a sound muted by the flaps of his pilot cap strapped over his ears. He jabbed the selector switch, in the vain hope that it may have miraculously started working at the lower altitude.

_Fat chance._

Resigned to his fate, he closed his eyes, his heart beginning to pound, and did what he had to do.

“Hooo boy,” Dick whistled low through his teeth, neck craned back to see the black shape of the Sopwith Camel making its landing approach against the navy night sky. “He ain’t throttling back any, that sure ain’t good.” He ran for the klaxon mounted on the wall of the hut, slamming the top of it to sound it.

The blare of the klaxon sent men scattering from their huts, stumbling across the frosty ground in their nightshirts and boots that were only half on their feet, looking up at the sky. Dick was already swinging up into the cab of the fire truck, and as he kicked the engine into life a man jumped onto the footplate to join him. 

“What’s the story, Gumboot?” the man called from the footplate.

“Flying Officer Wright, sir! I think he’ll overshoot the runway, sir!”

“Then drive, man, drive!” Squadron Leader Armando slammed his palm against the metal door.

The fire truck accelerated away towards the landing strip, drawing level with the Camel as it attempted to land, the chugging and popping of its Gnome engine abruptly cutting off. Wheels contacted with frozen turf, bouncing a few times, eating the length of the runway in a matter of seconds.

“Shiiit!” Dick hauled on the wheel, sending the firetruck around the left of Hanger Four, while the Camel slewed to the right, missing the wooden walls by a hair’s breadth. 

Hanger Five really didn’t stand a chance – it had been flimsily erected a few weeks previously using requisitioned timber, and the Camel’s sturdy wings went through the walls like cardboard, ripping one side clean off and causing the remaining walls to fall down like a house of cards. By the time the fire truck had made it around the side of Hangar Four, and Dick had a view of the Camel again, the biplane was finally starting to lose some speed, leaving behind the wreckage of Hangar Five, which had been storing a S.E.5a biplane now wearing the corrugated tin roof as a cock-eyed hat. The fire truck caught up once more, but now they were heading towards the crop fields that surrounded the base. 

“Stop, stop!” Armando bellowed from the footplate, and Dick had no choice but to bring the truck to a screeching halt just in front of the fence. The Camel kept going, knocking the fence flat, its wheels sinking into the muddy field. With this increased resistance, the plane finally rolled to a stop, miraculously still intact.

Phoenix was breathing a sigh of relief when he got a face full of cold water from the fire hose.

“GARRRGHLUB-“ the jet of water was then directed away from him and onto the humped cowling of his aircraft. “What the hell-“

“Just hosing the fuel off, pal!” was Dick’s cheery response.

“Ugh,” Phoenix unstrapped his leather pilot’s cap, wiping his face with it. It stank of sweat, stale from his earlier dogfight, and fresh from that landing. The cold soaking had been enough to bring him down from the adrenalin rush. His heart was still pounding, though.

“Flying Officer Tripe!”

Phoenix peered over the side of the cockpit, seeing Squadron Leader Armando standing below, the headlights of the fire truck revealing the laconic smirk on his face. He groaned inwardly.

“Get your sorry petard out of that plane and give me a report.”

“Yes, sir,” Phoenix sat on the edge of the cockpit, swinging his legs over the side and gingerly probing the lower wing of his Camel with one foot. 

It seemed sturdy, still, despite him crashing the left side into Hangar Five to counteract the Camel’s tendency to pull to the right. He put his weight on the wing briefly to enable him to drop down onto the ground, his boots squelching into the mud. Being back on the ground again was an inordinate relief. He hadn’t even dared to think about the possibility that he might not survive the landing, and it was the hundreds of hours of flight training and sorties that had kept him in one piece. He looked at the Squadron Leader, realising that Armando had found two convenient cabbages to stand on to keep his boots clean.

“Well?” Armando tilted his head to one side. “This had better be spectacular.”

“Yes, sir,” Phoenix paused, took a breath, trying to figure out where to start. “So, I sortied at 3am, as per the rota, and I headed towards Peterborough. I met a lone Hun above Ely, a Gotha.”

“New or old type?”

“New type, sir. We had a bit of a chase.” This utterly failed to describe the protracted dogfight and the number of bullets that had peppered holes through his fuselage – the odds hadn’t been good, a lone Camel against the Gotha’s two gun emplacements, but he hadn’t been able to resist the chance. “I got a lucky shot in the Gotha’s engine and down it went, but not before I had my dashboard shot up.”

Armando climbed up onto the wing, looking in the cockpit. There was glass all over the floor, and two large bullet holes in the dashboard – one in the altimeter and one next to the selector switch, which controlled the throttle to the engine.

“Quite the mess you’ve made there, Trite,” he commented, hopping down. “That’s going to take some time to fix.”

“...Yes, sir,” Phoenix said sadly.

“But you brought her home in mostly one piece.”

Phoenix nodded.

“Cocky git. You should’ve left it.”

“I probably should have done, sir.”

“There’s just no telling some people, is there?”

“No, sir.”

Armando rolled his eyes. They’d had conversations like this on a number of occasions.

“Had the Gotha dropped its payload?” he asked.

“No. It went down in the fens and made a mighty bang. Quite close to Ely so I imagine the fire watch will have witnessed it.”

Armando shrugged.

“Guess the Cathedral survives another day. That’ll do, chalk it up,” he said. “Although how you’re still alive continues to mystify me.”

“Er,” Phoenix scratched the back of his head sheepishly. This revealed the ragged tears in the sleeve of his pilot suit, ripped by the bullets that had holed his dashboard. “Luck?”

“HA!” Armando guffawed. “Dumb luck, if you ask me. Go back to the barracks, which you so kindly left intact, and don’t forget to make some kind of pathetic apology to Badgeworth for the state of his hangar, or he’ll spit a dummy or two.”

“Er... sorry about that, sir.”

“You’re nothing like as sorry as you’d be if you’d ground looped, Trike.” Armando also flew a Camel, and was well aware of how difficult they were to control at high speeds on the ground – with the force of the engine, any imbalance in the wing level was likely to cause the plane to cartwheel and end up in a pile of matchsticks.

“...Yes, sir,” Phoenix admitted.

“Dismissed!” Armando barked.

“Sir!” Phoenix saluted, then began gingerly picking his way through the mud. 

He only made it as far as the fence before being accosted.

“NICK!” Larry wailed. “What have you done to my baby?”

“She’s fine, Larry,” Phoenix slapped him on the shoulder with one gloved hand. “Like I’d ever come a cropper in one of your tune-ups.”

“You’ve still busted the selector switch, or you wouldn’t have come in like that,” the sun was starting to come up and Phoenix could see Larry’s accusing stare. “And I bet you’ve ripped all the canvas on the left wing, do you know how long I spent mixing that dope to get the colour you wanted? Hours! Hours of my life, man!”

“Like the hours I spent talking the Major out of booting you off the base after you brought those three Land Army girls back to barracks?”

“Yeah, just like those! And d’you know who’ll have Edgey breathing down their neck while rebuilding that hangar? Me! That’s who!” Larry poked Phoenix in the chest. “You owe me big time, Nick-o!”

Phoenix sighed.

“How many pairs of tights?”

“Like, your whole next package.”

“Well damn, that’s the end of that, then,” Phoenix held his hand out, and they shook on it. 

His mother had been rather bemused by Phoenix’s request for pairs of nylon tights to be included in future packages she sent to him. They were scarce in Britain but plentiful in his home state of California, and remained the best bargaining tool that Phoenix had, especially for Air Mechanic Larry Butz, who distributed them gleefully to the pretty Land Army girls who worked the cabbage fields that surrounded the base. They wouldn’t go anywhere near him otherwise.

“Seriously, though, dude, that was a hairy landing – don’t do that again, yeah? I’d hate for one of my babies to end up in a heap!”

“I imagine that next time the bullets will go through me before hitting the dashboard,” Phoenix said grimly. 

“Eh-up, here comes the Red Baron!” Larry made a quick exit, sprinting towards the Camel to perform his official inspection, but Phoenix would not be getting away so easily.

“Wright!” Flight Lieutenant Edgeworth roared. He was still in his magenta night shirt. “What the devil have you done to my hangar?”

“...Totalled it, sir,” Phoenix braced himself.

“Damn right you have, you blithering idiot!” Edgeworth’s tirade blistered his ears. “Do you have any idea what kind of damage you could have done to my kite? As it is it’s covered in splinters from your barnstorming escapade! What the hell did you think you were doing? Why didn’t you approach from the other direction and park it in the trees or something? At least the lack of plane would have put you out of commission so I wouldn’t have to put up with your incompetence for a few sorties!”

“Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” Phoenix mumbled. Fortunately his flying scarf masked the smile he was trying to keep from his face, as he'd just caught sight of Edgeworth's S.E.5a with its tin roof hat.

“Do you think that kind of pathetic apology is going to placate me, Flying Officer?” Edgeworth said hotly. “What are you going to do about it, hm?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You’re going to clean my plane, that’s what!”

“Very good, sir,” Phoenix nodded, sidling away from the irate Lieutenant.

“Every last splinter!” Edgeworth shouted after him.

“Hey, Lieutenant Edgeworth, sir!” Dick was hurrying towards him. “Did you hear the news?”

“What news?” Edgeworth humphed. “It’d better be good news.”

“Well, it’s good news in a way, sir,” Dick beamed. “Flying Officer Wright bagged one of the new Gotha bombers! Our base is leading the way in Hun kills on home soil, ain’t that swell!”

Edgeworth turned as magenta as his nightshirt.

“A Gotha GV?” he fumed. He’d yet to even see one, never mind score a kill. “Damn it, I outrank him, this is an outrage!”

He whirled around to look at his beloved S.E.5a, its burgundy wings poking out from beneath the tin roof that some ground crew were lifting clear. Phoenix was nowhere to be seen.

“WRIGHT!”

Phoenix heard it from the barracks and slunk away to enjoy his cup of hot cocoa, a grin on his face. The sun was rising, it was a new day, and he was still alive. In these times of war, what more could he ask for?

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the wiki entry for the Sopwith Camel:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_Camel
> 
> They are difficult aircraft to fly and have killed many inexperienced pilots due to their tendency to pull to the right and generally rock around as a result of their rotary engine, as shown in this video:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3DXEsC4Pq8
> 
> Here's a video of a Camel experiencing a ground loop on takeoff:  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4nthF8_xEk at about 2:16  
> The pilot wisely cut the engine so the prop wasn't still going, else it would've done a lot more damage to the buildings with the head-on collision!
> 
> Another feature of certain versions of the Camel, that used the Gnome engines, is that they lower engine speed by means of a selector switch. If this gets put out of commission then it is impossible to reduce engine speed, hence Phoenix being forced to attempt his landing at full speed and cutting the engine at the last minute, instead of being able to blip the engine as one normally would to slow down. Cutting the engine too early runs the risk of a stall and a crash, and too late would've made it too difficult to control the aircraft on the ground.
> 
> I based this in a Home Defense airbase, as many Camels were modified for use in defense against the Gotha night bombers used by the German airforce in the latter part of the war. Edgeworth flies an S.E.5a which is supposed to be a more stable and superior-performing aircraft in many respects, although it does not have the maneuverability of the Sopwith Camel.
> 
> All aircraft were immensely precious in WW1, so historically speaking, the best things to come out of this were the survival of the pilot without too much damage to the plane!


End file.
